domingo, janeiro 31, 2010

AGW theory is toast. So’s Dr Rajendra Pachauri. So’s the Stern Review. So’s the credibility of the IPCC. But if you think I’m cheered by this you’re very much mistaken. I’m trying to write a Climategate book but the way things are going by the time I’m finished there won’t be anything left to say: the battle will already have been won and the only people left who still believe in Man Made Global Warming will be the eco-loon equivalents of those wartime Japanese soldiers left abandoned and forgotten on remote Pacific atolls.

Predict catastrophe no sooner than five years hence but no later than 10 years away, soon enough to terrify but distant enough that people will forget if you are wrong.

Real calamities take our minds off hypothetical ones. Besides, according to the U.N. World Meteorological Organization, there has been no recorded global warming for more than a decade, or one-third of the span since the global cooling scare.

Today, politicized "science" has too big a stake in the global warming hysteria to let the facts speak for themselves and let the chips fall where they may. Too many people-- in politics and in the media, as well as among those climate scientists who are promoting global warming hysteria-- let the raw data on which their calculations have been based fall into the "wrong hands."

Smoking, then, has become like freemasonry or homosexuality. We have our secret signs. Our equivalent of funny handshakes and gaydar. We use tricks and nods and winks to establish a bond with other smokers. We coerce them into lighting up first, to gauge the reaction, and then we huddle around the lone ashtray, feeling lost in the room but somehow emboldened by one another’s company.

They fail to see what's really happening. People have traveled to Pandora to take something that belongs to the Na'vi: their land and the minerals under it. That's a stark violation of property rights, the foundation of the free market and indeed of civilization.

quarta-feira, janeiro 27, 2010

AVATARded - Inspired by James Cameron's recent epic, "Avatar," Avatarded is an adjective used to describe a situation, person, place or thing that has reached a level of such complete retardation that it can only be described as exquisite or the first of its kind. Can also be used to describe something so new (such as Avatar's groundbreaking technology), that the reality of it is stupefying and leaves you dumbfounded, retarded, or...Avatarded.

It is true that capitalism was named by its enemies. Thus, it's interesting to note that a socialist is someone who believes in socialism, a communist someone who believes in communism but a capitalist is someone with capital.

It's also true that capitalism is a truly social system, a system that unites the world in cooperation, peace and trade. Thus, if all were tabula rasa socialism might be a good name for capitalism. But that boat has sailed.

So if we name crony capitalism, capitalism, and if we can't name capitalism, socialism, then what should capitalism be named?

The scientist behind the bogus claim in a Nobel Prize-winning UN report that Himalayan glaciers will have melted by 2035 last night admitted it was included purely to put political pressure on world leaders.

Dr Murari Lal also said he was well aware the statement, in the 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), did not rest on peer-reviewed scientific research.

In an interview with The Mail on Sunday, Dr Lal, the co-ordinating lead author of the report’s chapter on Asia, said: ‘It related to several countries in this region and their water sources. We thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policy-makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action.

The media are finally beginning to admit that the World Health Organization's "pandemic" - made possible, as I've argued before, only by completely redefining the definition for political reasons - is the mildest ever. Several European countries have cut back their vaccine orders, and the chairman of the influential health committee of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, who is an epidemiologist, has asked the body to investigate what he calls the WHO's "false pandemic" and "one of the greatest medicine scandals of the century."

Indeed, over time, and nowhere more so than in America, urban disasters came to be understood as engines of urban development and economic growth. Puritans had viewed calamities as useful "corrections," afflictions sent by God to call sinners back to the path of virtue. But the material benefits of destruction were soon apparent, too.

the enormous reconstruction projects demanded after catastrophes put capital into circulation, produced enormous profits for some and enabled economic innovations that increased productivity—a combination of circumstances that fueled investor confidence.

Before the earthquake struck, the United States had the $100 million it has committed to spend and Port-au-Prince was habitable; afterwards, we will have a rebuilt nation but not $100 million.

It is absurd to say that the earthquake will be good for Haiti’s economy. If that were true, why did the world await natural disaster? If Haiti needed an economic boost, we should have carpet-bombed it years ago. The plain fact is that disasters make everyone permanently poorer by the values of the lives and property they destroy. Earthquakes have no silver linings.

This is the same “logic” behind the notion that the bombing of great cities to rubble during World War II was good for economic development because it was an opportunity to construct modern infrastructure that would have otherwise required many years to put in place.

Heaven forbid that we should have to wait for economic depreciation and normal wear-and-tear! (It was, however, good for New York, which had the great fortune of being the only major western city left standing after the war, but that of course was because New York itself was not air-bombed.

Friedrich Nietzsche was the first to notice that religious emotions, like guilt and indignation, are still with us, even if we're not religious.

Now the secular world still has to make sense out of its own invisible, psychological drama—in particular, its feelings of guilt and indignation. Environmentalism, as a substitute for religion, has come to the rescue.

Nietzsche's argument about an ideal God and guilt can be replicated in a new form: We need a belief in a pristine environment because we need to be cruel to ourselves as inferior beings, and we need that because we have these aggressive instincts that cannot be let out.

Manmade global warming, for many, is an Earth-worshipping religion. The essential feature of any religion is that its pronouncements are to be accepted on the basis of faith as opposed to hard evidence. Questioning those pronouncements makes one a sinner.

Nonetheless, there is much at stake in getting people to subscribe to the global warming religion. There is so much at stake that some scientists, using government grants, are fraudulently manipulating climate data and engaging in criminal activity, as revealed in what has been called "Climate gate." One of the most dangerous features of the global warming religion is its level of intimidation of heretics or would-be heretics.

Instead, many such disputes would be resolved on paper or through mediation, which could become compulsory for couples warring over contact with children. Court-room hearings may not be eliminated entirely but hundreds of disputes should be settled without the need for a full-blown hearing, with all the costs and acrimony involved, ministers believe.

In recent decades, thousands .... have gone out of business. What is not widely known is that this “marginality” has often been the result not of market forces but of government regulation.

It appears the Green movement is prepared to destroy the property rights of despised groups such as farmers and devastate their lives in order to achieve its ends.

That menace is not, of course, the illusory threat of AGW which our governments so cheerfully use to fleece us and impose control of over us. That menace is eco-fascism. It’s real, it’s terrifying and it’s time we fought back.

.... The only way to get our message across that we’re sick to the craw of Green lies, Green taxes, and Green tyranny is to punish all the mainstream parties – and that very much includes Cameron’s Green Conservatives – at the polls.

quarta-feira, janeiro 20, 2010

I’m getting absolutely sick and tired of reading people constantly referring to “freedom” and “democracy” as synonyms. Democracy is what’s led to the nanny-state we live in and the scum that rule us in parliament; but worse than that, the very concept is founded on a disgusting, depraved and immoral idea: that might makes right; but minorities have none. That the mob rules, and if your life get’s ruined in the process: tough luck buddy!

###

4. You live in a small village, it has a population of 100 people. One day two scary looking and aggressive armed men knock on your door and kidnap you and throw you in a locked cage. You later discover 55% of the people in the village voted that you weren’t allowed to drink coffee and that it should be punishable with 2-5 years in prison. You are unhappy with this outcome.

Here’s the moral: EVERYTHING THE GOVERNMENT DOES FALLS INTO SITUATION 4! The situation I posted might seem semi-ridiculous on its surface, but it’s really not. If you can use your imagination you can apply the reasons why it’s wrong, and why the guy in jail is a victim, to almost every single piece of regulation and law-making the bureaucrats enact. From minimum wage laws, to smoking bans, to the prohibition of drugs and even (counter-intuitively listed on purpose) to the child safety standards by which toy manufacturers have to abide. Seriously.

The real implication of Brown’s victory isn’t that the Republicans can now stop the Democrats. It’s the informational signal it sends to current Senators that they have over-reached. A lot. When a Republican wins an election to replace Ted Kennedy whose signature issue was health care in perhaps the most liberal state in the country, and he wins running against ObamaCare and as a real Republican not some Republican Lite for Massachusetts, it’s a wake-up call of enormous proportions.

It still seems unthinkable that the Democrats could lose a Senate seat in Massachusetts .... So if Scott Brown does beat Martha Coakley what will it mean? Here are 10 suggestions:

1. Health care reform is dead. Even if there was (and it’s doubtful) some procedural way the Democrats could push it through, such a move would be political suicide.

2. Obama will have failed to achieve his signature reform despite Democrats having had a healthy majority in the House and a 60:40 advantage in the Senate. That is a huge blow and could render him not just a one-term President but a one-year President in terms of his political authority.

3. Obama’s will have failed to achieve his signature reform in such a way as to destroy any chances of fulfilling a signature pledge: to bring a new bipartisanship to Washington. By pushing through a bill on a party-line vote in the Senate, he left himself vulnerable to an electoral surprise or a death – it was a win-or-bust strategy

Like a giant wad of grape Bubble Yum, it seems the longer you chew over it, the less pleasant it gets. This, I think, helps explain how Scott Brown came from behind in Massachusetts. And it's presumably why the White House has recently taken to saying essentially that Democrats need to just go ahead and pass the bill so that they can then work on explaining what's in it and why it's so great. Usually it works the other way around, but hilariously incompetent candidates like Martha Coakley desperate times call for desperate measures.

Um comentário ao artigo:

I'm beginning to suspect Obama isn't the savvy and formidable political tactician he's been made out to be.

In a stunning upset that reshaped the U.S. political landscape, Republican Scott Brown won Tuesday's special election in Massachusetts for the U.S. Senate seat formerly held by liberal Democrat Ted Kennedy.

Brown's victory strips Democrats of their 60-seat Senate super-majority, needed to overcome GOP filibusters against future Senate action on a broad range of White House priorities. Senate Democrats needed all 60 votes in their caucus to pass the health care bill, and the loss of one seat now imperils generating that support again for a compromise measure worked out with the House.

###A dimensão da vitória:

Brown's victory made real the once unthinkable prospect of a Republican filling the seat held by Kennedy, known as the liberal lion, for almost 47 years until his death due to brain cancer last August. Before Kennedy won the seat for the first time in 1962, his older brother John held it for nearly eight years until his election as U.S. president in 1960.

No Republican had won a U.S. Senate race in Massachusetts since 1972, and Democrats control the governorship, both houses of the state legislature, and the state's entire congressional delegation.

I’ve no idea how much faith Messrs. Greenspan and Bernanke had in markets. But I do know that, from Adam Smith to Vernon Smith, scholars who brought to light markets’ remarkable ability to self-regulate always insisted that a prerequisite for this self-regulation is sound money.

With prices and interest rates distorted by government’s monopoly control over the money supply, investors, producers, and consumers were fooled into making choices that seemed reasonable but were revealed only later to be misguided.

The emphasis that scholars through the ages have placed on the importance of sound money is being ignored in today’s headlong rush to convict the likes of F.A. Hayek and Milton Friedman of a crime they never committed – namely, the crime of insisting that markets work flawlessly regardless of the institutional structures in which they are embedded.

"Haiti needs a new version of the Marshall Plan—now," writes Andres Oppenheimer in the Miami Herald, by way of complaining that the hundreds of millions currently being pledged are miserly. Economist Jeffrey Sachs proposes to spend between $10 and $15 billion dollars on a five-year development program

For actual Haitians, however, just about every conceivable aid scheme beyond immediate humanitarian relief will lead to more poverty, more corruption and less institutional capacity. It will benefit the well-connected at the expense of the truly needy, divert resources from where they are needed most, and crowd out local enterprise. And it will foster the very culture of dependence the country so desperately needs to break.

Highlighted in The Sunday Times yesterday, Dr Hasnain was the scientist responsible for claiming that the world's glaciers were melting so fast that those in the Himalayas could vanish by 2035. This was picked up by the New Scientist and then by a 2005 WWF report, and subsequently published as a definitive claim in the IPCC's 2007 fourth assessment report, masterminded by Dr R KPachauri.

.... Dr Hasnain .... has admitted that the New Scientist report was based on "speculation" and was not supported by any formal research ....

In November 2008, they were successful, being awarded a $500,000 grant for "research, analysis and training on water-related security and humanitarian challenges to South Asia posed by melting Himalaya glaciers."

During the recent meeting with President Obama, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao minced no words when he stated that "immediate action is necessary to keep a once prosperous nation" from falling flat on its face.

"If the U.S.economy collapses, so will China because we are so heavily invested in your country,"

Mr. Obama was then given the following list of changes designed to fix America:

1. Replace all regulatory czars with one mandarin of deregulation.

###

6. Cancel all foreign aid. Retrain ACORN employees as small business instructors and ship them to third world countries with one-way tickets. Let them earn their keep by promoting the private sector and developing consumer markets for American products.

7. Sell off Fanny Mae and Freddie Mac to the highest bidder with a special "buy one, get one free" incentive. Eliminate subprime mortgage programs.

12. Cut taxes and eliminate government programs including welfare and food stamps. Those willing to eat must wash dishes at Pei Wei Asian Diners and stuff fortune cookies with quotes by Friedrich Hayek, Ayn Rand, and Milton Friedman.

13. Shut down public schools; that should double the national IQ within six months. Sell the buildings to private schools that teach strong work and study ethics. If you want your children to build self-esteem, convert the Department of Education into a Ping Pong Palace.

18. Stop subsidizing industrial and agricultural concerns, ethanol plants, and wind farms. If they can't stand on their own, let them fall and give way to those that can.

19. Mandate all public officials to use public transportation and public health care. Cap their salaries until the economy in their districts fully recovers.

21. Resettle those Americans who advocate green collective lifestyle to Cuban tobacco plantations with no electricity and polluting farm equipment, where they will toil the rest of their days in fields fertilized by own excrement.

My arrival (very recently) at philosophical anarchism has disturbed some of my conservative and Christian friends. In fact, it surprises me, going as it does against my own inclinations.

Christians, and especially Americans, have long been misled about all this by their good fortune. Since the conversion of Rome, most Western rulers have been more or less inhibited by Christian morality (though, often enough, not so's you'd notice), and even warfare became somewhat civilized for centuries; and this has bred the assumption that the state isn't necessarily an evil at all. But as that morality loses its cultural grip, as it is rapidly doing, this confusion will dissipate. More and more we can expect the state to show its nature nakedly.

For me this is anything but a happy conclusion. I miss the serenity of believing I lived under a good government, wisely designed and benevolent in its operation. But, as St. Paul says, there comes a time to put away childish things.

Two years ago the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a benchmark report that was claimed to incorporate the latest and most detailed research into the impact of global warming. A central claim was the world's glaciers were melting so fast that those in the Himalayas could vanish by 2035.

In the past few days the scientists behind the warning have admitted that it was based on a news story in the New Scientist, a popular science journal, published eight years before the IPCC's 2007 report.

It has also emerged that the New Scientist report was itself based on a short telephone interview with Syed Hasnain, a little-known Indian scientist then based at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi.

Hasnain has since admitted that the claim was "speculation" and was not supported by any formal research.

Had the regime underststood what the internet would mean– the destruction of official media and the proliferation of unofficial thinking, booming web commerce instead of brick and mortar stores, etc.–it never would have allowed it to come into existence.

This month marks the 15th anniversary of the death of Murray Rothbard, arguably the most important libertarian theorist of the twentieth century. Although I only met him once in person, his work was influential in developing my “calling” in a number of ways, and the way he approached his scholarly and activist work for libertarianism over his life provides a number of lessons for advancing our own callings and the freedom movement more broadly.

Twenty year ago I was an extreme right-wing Republican, a young and lone "Neanderthal" (as the liberals used to call us) who believed, as one friend pungently put it, that "Senator Taft had sold out to the socialists."

Today, I am most likely to be called an extreme leftist, since I favor immediate withdrawal from Vietnam, denounce U.S. imperialism, advocate Black Power and have just joined the new Peace and Freedom Party.

And yet my basic political views have not changed by a single iota in these two decades!

A group of white, mostly middle-class well-off kids who find imperfections in there life and create a ridiculous, depressing melodrama around each one. They often take anti-depressants, even though the majority don't need them. They need to wake up and deal with life like everyone else instead of wallowing in their imaginary quagmire of torment.

How bizarre! The World Health Organization has declared swine flu a "pandemic," signaling governments worldwide to launch emergency response plans.

The mildest pandemics of the 20th century killed at least a million people worldwide, according to the WHO, while old-fashioned seasonal flu strikes every nation yearly and kills an estimated 250,000 to 500,000. As of Thursday [isto foi em Junho de 2009], when the pandemic was declared, H1N1 swine flu had killed only 144 people total — fewer than succumb daily to ordinary flu. And in Mexico, where the outbreak began and where it has been the most severe, cases peaked quickly, in just four weeks.

”We have had a mild flu - and a false pandemic,” says Wolfgang Wodarg, the chair of the Health Committee in The European Council. The German parliamentarian is also an epidemiologist and former health director in Flensburg. For that reason he has followed the H1N1-pandemic closely since June 11 and up to the present. He calls the pandemic "one of the greatest medical scandals of the century”, and for that reason he has decided to take the case to the European Council:

"In January, we will arrange an emergency debate about the influence of the pharmaceutical industry on the WHO, and 47 parliaments all over Europe are going to be informed. Following this, we will initiate an investigation and hearings involving those responsible for the pandemic emergency,” says Wolfgang Wodarg.

The novel's chief villain is Wesley Mouch, a bureaucrat who cripples the economy with endless regulations. This sounds familiar. Reason magazine reports that "as he looks around Washington these days," Rep. Paul Ryan "can't help but think he's seeing a lot of Wesley Mouch."

Government employment is even worse than you wrote about in your recent article, reprinted on LRC. The feds have employed thousands, probably hundred of thousands or more, of additional “contract employees” in recent years. They’re listed by the Commerce Dept. as private sector employees even though all their pay and benefits come from government contracts. The D.C. suburbs are booming like they’ve never boomed before in terms of population growth. This boom started with Bush and Fatherland Security and his wars, and has been greatly expanded by Obama from everyting I’ve read. Unfortunately, good statistics are really hard to come by on these contract employees.

These facts suggest that it was a serious economic mistake to press for a hasty, major transformation of the U.S. economy on the heels of the worst financial crisis in decades. A more effective approach would have been to concentrate first on fighting the recession and laying solid foundations for growth. They should have put plans to re-engineer the economy on the backburner, and kept them there until the economy emerged fully from the recession and returned to robust growth. By failing to adopt a measured approach to economic policy, Congress and the president may be slowing the economic recovery, and thereby prolonging the distress from the recession.

Notwithstanding reports that all economists are now Keynesians and that we all support a big increase in the burden of government, we the undersigned do not believe that more government spending is a way to improve economic performance.

More government spending by Hoover and Roosevelt did not pull the United States economy out of the Great Depression in the 1930s. More government spending did not solve Japan’s “lost decade” in the 1990s. As such, it is a triumph of hope over experience to believe that more government spending will help the U.S. today. To improve the economy, policymakers should focus on reforms that remove impediments to work, saving, investment and production. Lower tax rates and a reduction in the burden of government are the best ways of using fiscal policy to boost growth.

segunda-feira, janeiro 11, 2010

.... from the mid-1990s, the Fed adopted a stance that encouraged irresponsible risk-taking. In periods of growth, it raised interest rates slowly, if at all, stubbornly refusing to acknowledge the course of asset prices. But when a recession or financial blow-up beckoned, it slashed rates and acted as a lender of last resort.

For all the damage that the financial industry has inflicted on itself, when disaster arrived the Greenspan/Bernanke put did pay off. By slashing the funds rate and providing emergency credit facilities to stricken financial firms, the Fed further entrenched the perception that its ultimate role is to provide a safety net for Wall Street.

Bernanke explicitly denied any Fed culpability for inflating the housing bubble and for the financial crisis that began when it burst. Despite his best efforts, no one seemed particularly convinced. By taking such an absurd stand, he has destroyed any credibility he may have had left.

.... is it really possible that Bernanke is so clueless that he does not see the relationship between the proliferation of ARMs and interest-only mortgages and the low short-term interest rates that made them so popular? ....

The only reason so many people were able to overpay for houses was because of the temporarily low "introductory" rates.

You guys are missing the point. When they hire workers to destroy these cities, they create jobs and add to GDP. In fact, they shouldn't even give them capital by which to perform such a feat. That way, they can create lots of jobs!

I’m willing to admit that the policeman has a difficult job, a very hard job, but it’s the essence of our society that the policeman’s job should be hard. He’s there to protect, protect the free citizen, not to chase criminals, that’s an incidental part of his job. The free citizen is always more of a nuisance to the policeman that the criminal. He knows what to do about the criminal …

domingo, janeiro 10, 2010

For many decades, Americans have held negative attitudes toward the titans of industry. … But Americans also don’t fancy the counterbalance to corporate power: government.

Government is not and never has been a “counterbalance” to corporate power. In fact, it’s historically been the primary enabler, the symbiotic partner, and a significant beneficiary of that power. The idea that an institution whose employees keep a revolving door spinning between Capitol Hill and the K Street offices of the corporate lobbies, an institution afloat in a sea of corporate campaign donations, an institution groomed to the express task of transferring money from the taxpayer’s pocket to the corporate bottom line, can act as a “counterbalance” to corporate power is absurd on its face.

Free trade isn’t a battle that countries (or states) win or lose. It is a human right – the liberty to engage in voluntary transactions that leave both participants better off. If John wants to sell something that Mary wants to buy, it should make no difference to the lawfulness of their exchange whether they are residents of different neighborhoods, different states, or different nations.

Government employment includes thousands of honest people doing honest work. Some of it is useful. The trouble is, since it is not subject to market pricing, you never know how useful it is.

But government highways, wars, and bureaucracies aren’t priced by markets. So you never know what they are worth .... No one knows. And no one really cares.

Out of 10 government employees, probably 2 do useful things…things that we would willingly pay for if they weren’t done for us by the government, though we would almost certainly pay less for them than they cost us now. Five others do things that are not worth doing at all – things that are purely wastes of money. And the other three do things that destroy wealth…things that actually make the situation worse. Those three are economists. Or lawyers. Or who-knows-what.

But transparency is not simply a means to better bills. It’s a means to better politicians — when people see one leader being smart and fair, while others are not. It’s a means to a better organized society — if people decide that politicians aren’t as qualified to apportion society’s resources as they thought. It’s a means to better-run programs — when people compare the dollars going in with the results coming out.

How could anyone be against transparency? Its virtues and its utilities seem so crushingly obvious. But I have increasingly come to worry that there is an error at the core of this unquestioned goodness .... The "naked transparency movement," as I will call it here, is not going to inspire change. It will simply push any faith in our political system over the cliff.

The phrase “transparent government” is just this side of a logical contradiction. A really transparent government would barely qualify as a government at all. Imagine if you could witness all the backroom dealing, logrolling, outright bribery, and the rest of the shenanigans that go on under the laughable rubric “governing.” It wouldn’t last a week.

According to the official, U.S. approved belief-system .... Once the current economic crisis has been solved, governments can and must again turn to the truly pressing among the remaining problems confronting mankind: the elimination of all unfair discrimination as the ultimate desideratum of democratic egalitarianism, and the control of the global environment and in particular the world climate.

Hand in hand with the efforts to eradicate the evil of discrimination, democratic governments must tackle the fundamental task of overcoming the excessive human particularism—the individualism, the localism, provincialism, regionalism and nationalism—ingrained still in the minds of most people and promote instead the ideal of universalism and of the Universal Man and the interests of humanity as such. The necessity of this policy is demonstrated most dramatically by the dangers of global climate change.

Gemeinwohl (public welfare) geht vor (comes before) Eigenwohl (private welfare)—this, above all, is what the problem of climate change demonstrates, and it is up to government to finally put this principle into action.

Is intellectual property needed as a shield for the weak against the strong? Those of us who have yet to make our name in the media markets should fear obscurity rather than piracy. Nor is intellectual property protection against merciless corporations. Rather, it is a tool these corporations use against the small.

When the Burj Khalifa officially opened in Dubai on Monday, much of the world press noted the irony of the world's tallest building unveiled just weeks after the emirate's debt crash.

But a look at the history of record-breaking skyscrapers and business cycles suggests otherwise -- the opening of every single "world's tallest" building in the past century has coincided with an economic downturn.

The components that give rise to the skyscrapers give rise to the boom: loose monetary policy and easy credit drive up land prices, "and people want to build higher to offset that," he said. "You have easy credit and low interest rates fueling stock prices, and this creates an overly speculative market place.

Judging people as individuals rather than as representatives of groups is both morally right and good for business.

Women would be well advised to ignore the siren voices of the new feminism .... Despite their frustration, the future looks bright. Women are now outperforming men markedly in school and university. It would be a grave mistake to abandon old-fashioned meritocracy just at the time when it is turning to women’s advantage.

Since Keynesians advocate so many forms of government intervention in the name of "full employment," it is not surprising to find them favoring it for other purposes. If government should take a man's earnings because he wants to save too much, why should it not take them on the ground merely that someone else needs or wants them? If government should build power plants to give employment, why not also railways and steel mills? Economists of the new order can only echo, "Why not?"

quinta-feira, janeiro 07, 2010

A collision Tuesday with a Japanese whalers destroyed a $2 million high-tech speedboat operated by Paul Watson and his anti-whaling outfit, the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society. It was probably the costliest collision yet for the group.

2009 was the year in which "global" swept the rest of the political lexicon into obscurity. There were "global crises" and "global challenges", the only possible resolution to which lay in "global solutions" necessitating "global agreements".

The word "global" has taken on sacred connotations. Any action taken in its name must be inherently virtuous, whereas the decisions of individual countries are necessarily "narrow" and self-serving.

"Globalism" is another form of the internationalism that has been a core belief of the Left: a commitment to class rather than country seemed an admirable antidote to the "blood and soil" nationalism that gave rise to fascism.

“To say man is bad because he is selfish is to say it’s bad because he’s alive.”

If Mr. Allison’s speech sounds vaguely familiar, it’s because it’s based on the philosophy of Ayn Rand, who celebrated the virtues of reason, self-interest and laissez-faire capitalism while maintaining that altruism is a destructive force. In Ms. Rand’s world, nothing is more heroic — and sexy — than a hard-working businessman free to pursue his wealth. And nothing is worse than a pesky bureaucrat trying to restrict business and redistribute wealth.

The implicit moral imperative is not to prevent human disruption of the environment but to ameliorate the social and political conditions that lead people to behave in environmentally disruptive ways. This is a critical distinction -- and one that environmentalists and scientists embroiled in the global-warming debate have so far failed to make.

Science could help untangle this politically impossible dilemma by moving away from its obsession with predicting the long-term future of the climate to focus instead on the many opportunities for reducing present vulnerabilities to a broad range of today's — and tomorrow's — climate impacts. Such a change in focus would promise benefits to society in the short term and thus help transform climate politics.

After rising by 35 per cent in 2008, Portuguese exports to Angola have continued to grow, strengthening the country’s position in second place behind China.

These inflows have been accompanied by growing numbers of Portuguese emigrants. With Portugal’s economy hard hit by the international finance crisis recession and unemployment rising, thousands of Portuguese have flocked to the oil and diamond-rich country.

In Africa, there are few countries in which the ubiquitous red and white colours of Coca-Cola haven't been plastered across billboards, buildings and banners to epitomise "Cocacolonisation" by the world's biggest soft drink brand.

However, Atlanta's mega marketing soft drink machine has failed to wrestle the number one position in Angola's rapidly growing soft drinks market. This can be viewed as a failure of note in a country with a young, fast growing population, and the fastest growing economy in the world thanks to the pouring in of Petro Dollars in return for the other globally popular liquid, Oil.

Where the progressives and state socialists go wrong is in thinking that weak worker bargaining power is inherent in the market itself. It is not. It is the result of State privilege. Therefore the solution is not further government intervention, as the progressives want, but repeal of privileges, subsidies, licenses and the rest of the sources of political advantage that protect the well-connected at the expense of the rest of us.

Mann’s co-workers at Penn State’s Earth System Science Center (ESSC) ... will read Kent’s offer Monday morning when they switch on their computers to check their email.

If any .... are prepared to give evidence, even if it doesn’t lead to any convictions, they could benefit from a share of tens of millions of dollars in recovered public funds.

Estimates of the total sums invested in government climate research already exceed $50 billion. The offer put on the table to Mann’s colleagues could be the most lucrative whistleblower deal ever made.

The French opposition Socialist party called for a parliamentary inquiry into what it described as the “fiasco” of the country’s 94m shots of H1N1 vaccine, saying the €869m ($1.25bn, £777m) cost had largely benefited the pharmaceutical companies .... Only 5m people have been vaccinated in France, which has a population of 65m.

“The cost is more than the deficit of all France’s hospitals and is three times [the amount spent] on cancer care,” he said.

Take-up of the swine flu vaccine has been lower than expected, partly because of contradictory messages on the value of vaccination, a refusal to use GPs which slowed campaigns, suspicion about side effects and the limited severity of the epidemic.

I don’t believe that this is a good idea, for three reasons. First, some parts of the pledge are inconsistent with fiduciary duties and ethical standards. Second the oath is a misplaced response to the financial crisis. Third, I don’t believe in pledges as an instrument to guide people’s behaviour.

The HBS school oath .... pushes the stakeholder value maximisation idea to its extreme by including the whole world as a stakeholder. If this oath indeed would be implemented, then the resulting erosion of shareholder property rights would prevent the development of capital markets .... and undermine economic growth. The oath is a commitment to bad corporate governance.

segunda-feira, janeiro 04, 2010

Remember how $200 billion in federal stimulus cash was supposed to save the states from fiscal calamity? Well, hold on to your paychecks, because a big story of 2010 will be how all that free money has set the states up for an even bigger mess this year and into the future.

in most state capitals the stimulus enticed state lawmakers to spend on new programs rather than adjusting to lean times. They added health and welfare benefits and child care programs. Now they have to pay for those additions with their own state's money.

This is the opposite of what the White House and Congress claimed when they said the stimulus funds would prevent economically harmful state tax increases. In 2009, 10 states raised income or sales taxes, and another 15 introduced new fees on everything from beer to cellphone ringers to hunting and fishing. The states pocketed the federal money and raised taxes anyway.

A shortfall of that size could force state governments to take unpalatable decisions such as pouring more public money into their funds or reducing pension benefits. State and local governments have already cut spending to close budget deficits.

Pension funds’ requirements are expected to compound the pressure on local finances. Thirty-six of the 50 US states, including California and New York, have plunged into budget deficits since fiscal year 2010 began, which for most states was July 1 2009, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

It’s a holiday so we’ll make this quick. Infections have somehow managed to drop again as have deaths and hospitalizations. Just 15 deaths reported this past week, versus 257 a week for seasonal flu during the season. Only four states reported widespread flu activity. Early January is when seasonal flu normally really gets going so we might see something of a bounce up in the next couple of weeks, especially since at 15 deaths there’s nowhere to go but up. But it shouldn’t be by much. Swine flu came in 2009 like a piglet and went out like a piglet.

The phenomena that economics touches upon, which include money, banking, exchange, prices, wages, monopoly theory, and many other topics, are themselves replete with moral significance. But the positive, scientific statements about these phenomena that constitute the discipline of economics are necessarily value neutral.

Likewise, economic policy may possess a moral dimension, but not a single proposition of economic theory involves a moral claim.

Nothing in the Deposit of Faith even comes close to deciding this and countless other important economic questions one way or the other. Not even the most uncomprehending or exaggerated rendering of papal infallibility would have the pope adjudicating such disputes as these. Yet misunderstandings or ignorance regarding such seemingly abstruse points are so often at the heart of the policy recommendations that bishops’ conferences propose and papal encyclicals can seem to imply.